1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to multilingual communications and in particular to systems and methods for real-time multi-lingual translated communications.
2. Description of the Related Art
The ever increasing globalization of the economy and popularity of social networking create more and more situations where discourse takes place between people using different languages. The participants can be further grouped by a topic (domain) of the conversation. The challenge is how to organize such multi-lingual conversation based on interest groups and find an efficient way to host it on the internet.
Currently there are no effective solutions for this problem, and there are no services offering a practical real-time multi-lingual conversation environment. Today's speech and language technologies (Automatic Speech Recognition, Machine Translation, and Text-to-Speech) are mature enough to help cross-lingual conversation in some well-defined domains. However, the challenge of having an open structure for organizing such cross-lingual conversations and make the open structure available to a large population, such as social networking groups, cannot be solved by these technologies alone.
Direct communication between a client and server on the internet is frequently impossible due to the presence of firewalls and proxy servers between peers. Thus, a direct client-server link is not a reasonable means of communication in this case. A data streaming based Distributed Speech Recognition (DSR) solution does not provide a control channel so it is difficult to have the flexibility for selecting different languages or domains dynamically.